Two Factors for Total Rochade Costs: Life-Cycle and Licenses

 
Life Cycle Costs and User Access Licenses costs are described in sections below

 
Total Life Cycle Costs
The total costs include installation, re-installations, and continuing support maintenance.  RoAccess has a clear advantage is reducing your total life-cycle costs.  RoAccess has almost no recurring costs while Viasoft/Rochade software, like Autopilot, is high maintenance/high life-cycle cost.  Judge for yourself.
RoAccess (Easy/Cheap)

RoAccess uses the latest "thin-client" model for Client-Server.  Install RoAccess once on your WEB server, and you are done.  Then anyone locally or in the world with a WEB browser is ready to access your Rochade Repositories.  Fast and simple! 

When a RoAccess upgrade is available, you merely un-zip or un-tar the files on only the server, and you are finished!   It costs nothing to add more users worldwide.   On a Rochade server cluster, you have unlimited usage, world-wide for both users and platforms/operating systems. 

No extra costs!

There are almost no recurring life-cycle costs. RoAccess can be used by anyone from browsers on any PC, NT, Win95, Windows, Unix, MacIntosh.  So you never buy/obtain different software for different platforms.  There is only one RoAccess WEB Server, and it runs on WinNT and Unix un-modified.  If you want to migrate RoAccess from NT to Unix or Unix to NT, no problem, you can  merely copy the software using FTP, but we conveniently package it in either PC .zip or Unix .tar formats merely for your convenience.  If you want to have RoAccess on NT and HP Unix and Sun Solaris and IBM AIX, no problem.  You are already licensed to put RoAccess on as many servers of the same cluster as you wish, world-wide.  And again, all these installations use the very same software.  No re-compiles, no different versions, not even a different language.  There really is only one distribution version of RoAccess. 

RoAccess is certified for a large number of browser makers (like Netscape and MS Internet Explorer), an a number of past versions, too.

This is what the new client/server world is all about.  Install once, run anywhere.

Viasoft/Rochade (Hard/Expensive)

The difficulty with Autopilot and other Viasoft software, like Operator, is that they are collections of programs and files that have to be installed, and re-installed, and re-installed on your PC and workstations.   Software provided by Viasoft is in the form of many programs, DLL's, configuration files, data files, short cuts, and more.  If you're familiar with Autopilot, it seems every time a new version of Autopilot or the repository server comes out, every PC in your organization has to have a re-install, and the install software is hard in itself.  Then if you upgrade from Windows to Windows 95 or Windows NT, again a re-install.  Then you have to upgrade the server software.  If employees change computers, you have to-reinstall on the new computers. Given 500 PC's in an organization in term of manpower and lost time, plus mis-installs can cost a great deal of continuing costs and support.

Viasoft/Rochade Software Approach Summary:

  • Add a remote Autopilot user, he must install or you do it for him.    (Not so with RoAccess)
  • If you want more users, you may have to buy additional licenses or buy an unlimited licenses (expensive) option.
  • If you want to have a remote user is another company use Autopilot to access your repository, you need additional signed license agreements.  (Not so with RoAccess)
  • Change you PC, you do a complete re-install (Not so with RoAccess)
  • Get a new version of Autopilot,  you do a complete re-install.  (Not so with RoAccess)
  • If you want to migrate Rochade software from NT-to-Unix or Unix-to-NT or one Unix to another for your Rochade servers,  you usually have to get different media and re-install.  If you want your WEB/Rochade server to run on NT and Sun Unix and HP Unix and IBM Unix all at the same time, each platform costs separately.  (Not so with RoAccess)
  • If you have 500 PCs with Autopilot software, you have to keep all 500 current.  If you forget to upgrade some, that can be a real problem trying to find out why they are having problems if they are the most recent version.   (Not so with RoAccess)
  • If you want an employee to use his PC at home for remote access, again another install.
    • The above is based on personal experience, user input, Viasoft management answers and published information.  If you're not sure, ask for yourself.

     
    How Many Rochade Licenses Do We Need
    The following is an actual question e-mailed to technical support from a customer who had only 5 Rochade licenses.
     
    Question: 
    > Our Company has 5 x Win95,  5 x OS/2 and 1 x MVS client licenses.
> In what way does the number of client licenses restrict the number of
> concurrent users of RoAccess?
>

     
    Answer:
    We have good news for you . Basically, you have effectively multiplied your effective number of licenses by probably 20 to 100. That is, you can probably have 20 to 100 users using RoAccess to view/input/edit data/reports during the same time period all sharing 1 license. If you have 5 licenses, multiply this by 5. 
    Details
    You have 5 Win95 licenses. That means you can have at most 5 Win95 users running Autopilot. As long as you have Autopilot running on your desktop, 1 license is checked out. If 5 people are running Autopilot, then all 5 Win95 licenses are checked out, and any more Win95 Autopilot accesses will be REFUSED.

    If you have 20 people in your organization with Win95 desktops, these 15 will have to wait until one of the 5 people currently running Autopilot exits. If any of these 5 people leave their desk for any reason while running Autopilot, those licenses will REMAIN checked out. There is an auto-log-off option, but people usually set it to 30 minutes, because you don't want to get logged off in the middle of something. Also, any user waiting to access the Rochade server does not get any kind of notice when any of the 5 exit Autopilot. So they won't know when to try again. This is a loss of time and productivity. 
    Now lets talk about RoAccess:
    RoAccess does NOT maintain a connection to the Rochade server. When you are viewing a screen of your data, or a list of items or viewing a Path Report, or anything else, there is NO connection to the Rochade server so NO licenses are checked out . The only time a connection is made is when you click on a button/link. Each time you click on a button, the following happens: 1) You are logged onto the Rochade server 2) Your query/update/report is run 3) You are immediately logged off the Rochade server. 

    This entire process takes only about 0.25 to 4 seconds usually. 

    So for a typical session, suppose a user would need to use Autopilot for 5 minutes to view some data and run reports. In this time period, using the 4 second value, 75 different RoAccess queries can have been run. If we use the 2 second value, 150 queries could have been run. If you were on a 10 processor UltraSparc, using the 0.25 value, you could have run 1200 queries with RoAccess in the same time period ! 

    All this was looking at how only one license could be shared among your users. If you have 5 licenses, then multiply this number by 5!

    What happens if you exceed the number of Licenses available? Lets suppose 10 users click on a button on RoAccess at the same time. Five of them will get a "Licenses Exceeded" error message. The nice thing about RoAccess is they merely hit "Reload" and their query is re-executed. Very convenient!